One night in the 1990s, our family was stolen and two bags of flour and some peppercorns were stolen. There is no way to know who the thief is, but it can be imagined that today I put two bags of flour in front of the thief, and I don’t want a penny, so I give it to him and ask h

One night in the 1990s, our family was stolen and two bags of flour and some peppercorns were stolen. There is no way to know who the thief is, but it can be imagined that today I put two bags of flour in front of the thief, and I don’t want a penny, so I give it to him and ask him to carry it home. I guess he also thinks it is heavy and worthless, so I won’t want it at all.

But this is in China. From the 1990s to the present twenty or thirty years, the entire society has undergone earth-shaking changes, and even thieves don’t know how many times they have “upgraded”. As for the "Lighthouse" of the United States, many people could not imagine that thieves were rampant here before coming here, and even stole a cake and a bottle of water.

A few years ago, we encountered this in the first month after we came to the United States. That day we were going to a party with a professor in the United States. We bought two buckets of juice and waited downstairs of the apartment to pick up our friends. A friend called and said it would take about 15 minutes to arrive, so we went upstairs to go down the bathroom. Juice is such a cheap thing, not a computer or a mobile phone, so I didn't care about it. It was placed on the windowsill outside the building management office. Unexpectedly, in less than ten minutes, the juice disappeared after we got off.

Later, I talked about this with my friends in China. My friends in China were like me, and everyone thought that even if you put two bottles of juice on the street, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up. First, I feel like I'm "depreciation" and I'm not ashamed of my face when I pick up this kind of thing, and second, I'm afraid that the stranger's drinks will be unclean.

But if you put two bottles of drinks on the streets of the United States, it will disappear in a short while. This kind of experiment can be done repeatedly and it will be unsatisfactory. This is the real United States behind the lighthouse.

A Chinese friend from the same city as me worked in a Chinese restaurant for several months. When he first went there, his colleague aunt told him, be careful not to lose it. He didn't care at the time, thinking that it was just the "old fried dough stick" who was scaring him a newcomer. After all, the stolen drinks are goods at the counter. Will someone steal a bowl of soup noodle that has just been cooked in the restaurant?

It’s true that he really encountered this after he was working for a few days. A customer asked for a bowl of rice noodles and wanted to pack it and take it away. When the rice noodles were ready to be packed, he was just put at the pickup table and was still looking for the corresponding license plate to press the pickup code. A person suddenly appeared next to him and ran away with the rice noodles. When he looked up, he had disappeared from the crowd and disappeared.

His experience taught me another lesson. I haven't seen this kind of thing about stealing food even when I was a child when the countryside was still poor in the northwest country. I only saw it in some costume movies and TV series. I didn't expect to come to the world's largest country and I actually "traveled through time".

Not long ago, my wife, who had been frugal in the United States for several years, finally made up her mind to buy herself a pair of high-end shoes. Who would have thought that the express delivery had signed for it, but the shoes were unknown. Call the seller, and the seller asks to find a courier company; call the courier company, and the courier company says it has signed for it, so look for it in your apartment; continue to call the apartment administrator, and the apartment administrator says they have posted a notice, so they are not responsible.

notice posted in the apartment (Photo source: self-photographed by the author)

A few days later, my wife met a Chinese student living in this apartment at the door of the apartment. After chatting, she realized that the international student had also lost something in the apartment, and it was also a very important laptop . She called the police, and the police soon found the thief, a black man living in the apartment with small braids. Interestingly, within two days, we met this thief again, and he still lived in this apartment.

Our experience is only fresh for people who have not lived in the United States for a long time. After staying here for a long time, everyone will get used to it. Moreover, the atmosphere of respecting and fascinating beauty in the Chinese circle has been mainstream for many years, and such rampant thefts are rarely mentioned.In fact, public data from all relevant parties also point to the tendency of theft in the United States.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation once released a "UCR Publications", which mentioned that the total number of property crime cases in the United States in 2016 was 7919,035. Among them, the proportion of burglary cases was 71.2%, ordinary theft cases accounted for 19.1%, and motor vehicle theft cases accounted for 9.7%. There are 245.08 property crime cases per 10,000 people in the United States. As a comparison, China has 47.66 property crimes per 10,000 people in the same period, only about one-fifth of that in the United States.

Also according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, there is a theft case every 25.7 seconds in the United States, with more than 3,300 theft cases occurring every day. More than 2.5 million people in the United States become victims of burglaries every year. In 2018, property damage caused by the theft in the United States was approximately $3.4 billion.

So many theft cases in the United States are generally believed to be caused by the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States and the high Gini coefficient. However, Liu Hongbin and Gao Yuchao published in in 2018 in the article "Current Research on the Theft Crime in China" on the article "Current Research on the Theft Crime in my country" pointed out: "Simply explain the differences in the changes in the theft crime between countries by using the gap between the rich and the poor and the income situation," said The convincing power may even have completely opposite results. As the saying goes, poverty is not the reason for crime. The factors that affect theft crime may be more in social culture . "

Americans go from thieves to robbing and then robbing with guns, and such things happen every day. In the past two years, more and more Chinese people have learned about the shootings in the United States and the real existence of robberies in the United States, but some people are still unwilling to believe such things as theft.

But this is our real experience, and so is authoritative data. I believe that as time goes by, Chinese people who stand up, become rich and become stronger will see a more real United States and a more real world. When you fully understand the truth of this world, you must become a Chinese patriot.